GOP commemorates 5 years of 'failed' stimulus

Screen shot of Republican National Committee report on the fifth anniversary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Updated: White House pushes back – see below

Never mind Presidents Day. For Republicans around the country, Monday is “five years of failed stimulus” day.

Monday marks the fifth anniversary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the $800 billion piece of legislation that was the first grand economic plan of President Obama’s first term.

Obama said at the time that the stimulus marked the “beginning of the end” of America’s economic crisis, but clearly recovery has not come as quickly as he had hoped. Less than six months after the bill had passed, Vice President Biden appeared on Meet the Press and said that the stimulus was not creating jobs as quickly as hoped because, “Everyone guessed wrong, at the time the estimate was made, about what the state of the economy was at the moment this was passed. Now, we’re going to recalibrate this in terms of what we’ve inherited, what in fact is going on out there. But look, the bottom line is that jobs are being created that would not have been there before.”

But the administration still calls it a success. Time magazine on Monday published an advance look at a report the White House plans to release this week claiming the stimulus has worked, boosting gross domestic product by 2% or more and preventing a “double dip recession.”

Republicans see it differently.

The Republican National Committee issued a research report Monday declaring that “Five Years Later, It’s Clear Obama’s Stimulus Was A Waste Of Taxpayer Dollars.” The report notes that the unemployment rate has come down far slower than the administration predicted, and highlights well-publicized controversies about stimulus funds going to individuals with close ties to the administration

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., posted a video on YouTube saying the stimulus “clearly failed” to resurrect the economy and serves as “proof hat massive government spending, particularly debt spending, is not the solution to our economic growth problems.”

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, issued a series of tweets to mark “signature stimulus moments,” such as

In our Monday paper, USA TODAY’s Gregory Korte tallied fraud enforcement actions under the Recovery Act and discovered that financial losses from fraud amounted to a fraction of what investigators had initially anticipated.

But John Hart, spokesman for Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. — long a critic of the law — said that loss rate is of little consequence. “Successfully pouring $840 billion down the drain with little spilling isn’t success,” Hart said.

UPDATE: In a blog post on the White House website Monday, Jason Furman, Chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, released a final quarterly report on the Recovery Act’s impact. The report, Furman says, shows “the Recovery Act had a substantial positive impact on the economy, helped to avert a second Great Depression, and made targeted investments that will pay dividends long after the Act has fully phased out.”